"The opportunity in incremental revenue for you is huge," said Eric Duffaut, SAP president and corporate officer, global ecosystems and channels. "You, as partners, can leverage these transformative technologies. You have the best solution in your hands," he said in a keynote speech Monday evening at the start of the company's Sapphire Now conference.

Duffaut also said SAP is developing a partner program specifically around the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service the company unveiled last week. A company spokesperson said more details of that initiative would be disclosed later in the conference.

While SAP is best known for its ERP application suites for small, midsize and enterprise customers, the company in recent years has moved aggressively into new technology areas including mobile computing, the HANA in-memory database for big data chores, and cloud computing options for its applications.

Those technologies are expected to be a major focus for SAP, its customers and its partners throughout this week's Sapphire Now show in Orlando, Fla.

Duffaut bragged about SAP's technology offerings, sprinkling his speech with such comments as "We have market momentum" and "We have, as a company, anticipated the transformation of our industry."

But he also repeatedly emphasized the role channel partners play in SAP's future success. "We, as a company, more and more depend on you," he said, noting that the company has doubled its indirect sales in just two years. He said more than 34 percent of the company's software revenue is through partner-led sales (the number was closer to 38 percent in this year's first quarter) as it closes in on its goal of the channel accounting for 40 percent of software revenue by 2015.

"We cannot do it alone. It's simply impossible," Duffaut said of the company's reliance on the channel to meet its goals. "Our ecosystem has the power to take us to new heights."

The channel executive urged partners to "be relevant" in competitive markets by combining their vertical industry expertise with SAP's technologies. That, he said, would lead to "the greatest level of innovation" and opportunities for growth.